Periodically Kalle Valo merges ath-next and ath-current branches from ath.git into wireless-drivers-next and wireless-drivers tree, respectively. Then David Miller merges them to net-next and net trees, respectively, which are eventually merged by Linus Torvalds to the official kernel releases.

As a rough estimate it takes patches in ath-next 2-4 months to propagate from ath.git to the next official Linux release and patches from ath-current 1-3 weeks to propagate to the next -rc release.

Git branches

ath.git contains multiple branches:

master: The default branch selected when cloning the tree. Everyone working on any ath drivers (ath10k, ath9k, ath6kl etc) should use this branch as the baseline for patches. Follows Bob Copeland's wireless-testing tree and contains the latest -rc release from Linus Torvalds + latest wireless + latest ath patches from ath-next and ath-current branches. The branch is rebased every time it's updated. Due to unclean history bisect will not work, better to use ath-next (or ath-current) for bisecting.

ath-next: Based on Kalle's wireless-drivers-next tree and will be periodically merged to wireless-drivers-next and scheduled for the next release under works (not for the current -rc releases). ath patches are commited to this branch first and then merged to the master branch. For bisect runs it's better to use this branch instead of the master branch.

ath-current: Based on Kalle's wireless-drivers tree and will be periodically merged to wireless-drivers and scheduled for the current release under works (for the upcoming -rc release).

pending: Used for building and runtime testing patches under review. Is rebased almost daily and hence commit ids are NOT stable. Use this only if you know what you are doing.

master-pending: The pending branch merged on top of the master, for easier testing of the pending patches. Same rules apply as with the pending branch.